Performance evaluation of Receiver Directed Transmission protocol with a single transceiver in MANETs

Utilising multiple channels can increase the wireless ad hoc network capacity. Receiver Directed Transmission protocol (RDT) is designed to provide multichannel access using a single radio interface. RDT introduces a clever approach to support channel assignment and negotiation without relying on a control channel or time synchronisation. Protocols based on the RDT scheme normally use an extra radio interface, dual home channel or time synchronisation to overcome the expected issues in RDT, such as, hidden terminal and deafness problems. This paper demonstrates that using RDT with a single radio and single home channel it is still possible to increase the network capacity. Additionally, the paper investigates the effect of node density, mobility and number of available channels on RDT performance. NS-2 simulator is used to evaluate the proposed scheme. Simulation results confirm that using multichannel RDT scheme can effectively increase the throughput, the packet delivery ratio and reduce the delay compared to single channel protocol.

I. Introduction

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a self-organising network with mobile nodes using multiple hops to communicate through radio links without relying on any fixed infrastructure. MANET suffers from limited resources in mobile nodes, such as power, processing capability and limited bandwidth, interference in wireless links which has a bad impact on network scalability. It is well known that the performance of MANET degrades significantly as the number of mobile hosts increases, due to higher degree of contentions and a greater number of collisions in the single shared channel.